Notice to AAS forum members: sorry for posting this here; just couldn't find a better forum for it. You might want to read particularly the PowerVR-related section as I speak a lot of Nokia in there. Also, feel free to follow the links to my earlier articles; I've discussed Nokia's products a lot for example in my Bluetooth and "The Competition" article. I won't cross-post them all in here because I don't want anyone say I'm flooding the forum with mostly Windows Mobile-related info. AGAIN, a lot of these articles contain tons of Symbian / Nokia-related info.

The original article (in the form I've cross-posted it to Windows Mobile sites) follows:

IMPORTANT NOTE: this is the nth part of my MWC (Barcelona) report series (a lot more to come!). Of course, I’ll try to cross-post them here too (I couldn’t do so while in Barcelona because of the very slow & expensive Internet connection), but it’ll take a lot of time; in the meantime, feel free to check out the original articles. It’s REALLY worth checking out them: many of them contain info that you won’t ever read anywhere else. Furthermore, some of the more “thematic” articles discuss all the news of a given area (audio encoding, Web browsing, advanced Bluetooth etc.)

Architecture-wise, it’s without doubt Samsung’s MWC announcement of a brand new, high-end chipset (also having a CPU), the S3C6410 (and its budget version, the S3C6430), that may be the most interesting to Windows Mobile users.

As you may already know, Samsung’s SC3244x (for example, the SC32442 used in the HTC P6300 (HTC Panda), E-Ten’s late 2007/early 2008 models like the X650 and the M800 etc – see the complete list HERE and HERE for the SC32442 and the SC32440, respectively), the chipset used in several current(!) Windows Mobile devices, is REALLY outdated. I’ve shown numerous examples and proofs of this (see for example THIS) - for example, the very bad CPU usage of A2DP (about 50% at 400 MHz) and the complete lack of advanced multimedia (MP3 / AAC) en/decoding support (this is why you can’t, for example, use the high-quality Resco audio codec pack with (old) Samsung CPU’s, as has also been pointed out HERE). These two tasks are all far better handled by any other, current CPU’s like Intel XScales (even the “old” PXA-2XX ones) and TI OMAP’s (again, even the oldest ones used in Windows Mobile 5+ devices). The only real advantage of the SC3244x is the CPU usage-independent power consumption – the other two, above-mentioned architectures can’t boast with this. (See the bottom section of THIS article for a proof.)

Before MWC, as far as their newer chipsets are concerned, only the S3C6400 was known. For example, E-Ten’s brand new, high-end, feature-packed V900 (to be released in April) will have this chipset. (Currently, there’re no other existing/announced devices (see THIS) with this CPU.)

This chipset is the base (the direct predecessor, parent) of the new S3C6410/ S3C6430 models. In this respect, it’s pretty much comparable to the Marvell XScale PXA270 as opposed to the PXA310, let alone the even more feature-rich PXA320.

The just-announced S3C6410, which is an even more advanced version of the S3C6400 , is even better; for example, it supports hardware 3D acceleration. Again, it’s like the PXA310 or the PXA320 compared to the PXA270. Unfortunately, currently, no future devices are known to have it.

(the 3D performance demo of the brand new S3C6410; you can see the S3C6410 flier I’ve also made some shots of here)

(multimedia demo on the older S3C6400)

(HD AX audio decoding demo on the older S3C6400)

(this is how an imaginary device could house the S3C6400)

Note that, currently, the only available online information is the above-linked one. While it does explain the advantages of the new S3C6410 platform over the “old” S3C6400 one, it’s definitely worth checking out their offline brochure I’ve taken a shot of (with my Nokia N95 – man, it DOES have a very nice camera. Hear that, Windows Mobile ODM’s? We want something similar on WM too!) Also note that Samsung’s portal doesn’t have any information on the S3C6430 at all. Finally, note that none of the other portals reporting on MWC have anything else on the new CPU than the above-linked press release (see for example MobileBurn, electronista.com, techon - these are the sites mentioning S3C6410 I could find via Google). That is, it’s in by me that you get a full rundown of the differences between the new CPU’s and the “old” S3C6400.

(again, click the pictures to get a full-resolution, readable one!)

As can clearly be seen, the S3C6410 is a much more advanced version of the S3C6400: it uses 65 nm technology instead of the 90 nm one (most probably resulting in major power and size savings), it has advanced 2D capabilities (for example, H.264 hardware decoding – as is also explained in the online version) and even 3D hardware acceleration. The “budget” S3C6430 seems to be exactly the same as the S3C6410; the only difference seems to be the complete lack of 3D hardware acceleration. Hope we’ll still see the latter (that is, the S3C6410) with proper (!) 3D drivers.

Also see THIS for their roadmap and THIS for a S3C6400 datasheet. Note that these pages only list the “old” S3C6400 and (still) don’t link to anything related to the S3C6410/S3C6430. By the time you read this, however, they may have already added info / links to this new info, though.